Sir/s ... Forgive me ... I have a completely different take on this and again forgive me if I'm about to 'rock the boat'.
Why not 'train' them ?. I realize (and have seen the underlying 'supposed' 'business' reasons) that some of our old timer skills are dwindling but .. I still do not see that as a reason for everybody to insist (as I've said before) to start making the mainframes look like the PC world. Unless of course, IBM wants to start adding 'CTRL-ALT-DEL' to NIPCON and MSTR consoles. Please do not misunderstand ... it's not that I do not like 'C' per se. In fact, I do like C for certain applications but I certainly do not like the rest of the Visual crud. Of course, everybody wants top performance too right ??.. Even with C, you have a compiler that, IMHO, is not suitable for true business needs ... why ... should we start talking about garbage collection, JAVA and such ??. Performance ??. To bring up another example, I seem to remember (back in a former lifetime while at Univ.) when I first learnt C, it was much easier... and any given 'C' application had but perhaps a .C and a .H file that one had to worry about. This perhaps is still true (have not touched C in close to three decades) but the rest of the variants certainly require more .xxx files and maintenance. I've had many (far too many) an argument with non-mainframe folks that have adamantly been opposed to the fact that we did not recompile our products every two days .... while I do understand their limited knowledge .. I personally don't want to promote them developing or maintaining MVS (or VM or VSE or or or or). Further, as I've told each and every one of them, verbatim, I do not need to recompile or reassemble my product every day just to justify my job. In fact, this relates to 'SCRUM' and 'AGILE' and the rest of the buzzword nonsense does it not ??. By the .. SCRUM, taken from the old rugby terms, mean (kinda) mass confusion (which is now seen) and agile... well, I'll let that one go for now. Another aspect that I see is the common complaint that 'oh .. we can't find people with good z/OS sysprog and or z/OS assembler' skills. Is that really true ??. Or would it more so be that there are plenty of sales folks, be they be associated to the 'development' world, the 'consulting' world, the PC world or even and especially, the HR / recruitment world that wants to cough up $60+/hr (in terms of consulting) or 90k+ (in terms of salary) for one that has almost no experience on the mainframe so long as they know JAVA ... BUT .. still keep looking for a Senior level developers or systems programmers, with strong experience in MVS, VM, VSE, Linux, WINDOWS, VMS, and whatever else have you, all for a paltry $20/hr ??. If that's not bad enough, all the while ... lopping off ten times as much for their own pockets. Invariably, when they cannot find anybody, their response to their management and or the client is ... 'oh nobody knows MVS or assembler'. We already have a non-mainframe world that barely can survive with one that codes in just any ONE language or architecture. More so, from what I've known, it's usually a mix of multiple .. e.g. .. JAVA for DB2 ... is it JUST JAVA ??. NO !!. We have a constant slew of buzz words that needs to be a tail to JAVA do we not ??. How about the fact that most all (if not all) of these recently graduated genius's don't even know how to spell assembly (in the PC environment that is). IMHO, costs and everything else come thereafter. No offence meant to anybody (and I'm being as honest as I can be) but .. I fear that currently, stupidity reigns. By the way ... if anyone of us had to have brain or heart surgery .. would we want one that learnt how to perform surgery with JAVA simulations ??. By that, I mean this as a reference to 'Rapid Development' and 'Point And Click' IDE's which has taken over the data processing and even, engineering world. Kind Regards Jim Thomas 617-233-4130 (mobile) 636-294-1014 (res) j...@thethomasresidence.us (Email) -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Edward Jaffe Sent: Thursday, August 04, 2011 1:41 PM To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu Subject: Re: assembler help! On 8/4/2011 11:27 AM, McKown, John wrote: > NO!!!! Why? Because we're too cheap to license the C compiler. We do have HLASM. Now, if they want to make the C/C++ come for free, I'd jump for joy. We had a license at one time. But a manager who was struggling to save his job decided that eliminating all "non-critical" software was the way to go. So the C license went. Followed shortly thereafter by the manager. Sorry, John. Your answer makes no sense. You must have misunderstood my question. I wasn't asking if IBM should remove support for HLASM exits and replace them with METAL C exits. I simply asked if it would be better if IBM provided sample exits in METAL C. The original poster seems to have a poor grasp of HLASM basics and I was wondering if she (and people like her) could be better served if sample exits were provided in METAL C. -- Edward E Jaffe Phoenix Software International, Inc 831 Parkview Drive North El Segundo, CA 90245 310-338-0400 x318 edja...@phoenixsoftware.com http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ----- No virus found in this message. 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